How To Be More Confident When Speaking To Others In Work And Life

This new article will show you everything you need to know about how to be more confident when speaking.

A lack of confidence can prevent you from sharing your talents with others. Like you, I have had experiences when my personal insecurities made it impossible for me to perform at my peak. After a poor performance I would shake my head wondering why I could not perform in front of others – when it mattered most. Low self-confidence is a cruel and unfortunate condition for many talented people.

If you are like most people, you have probably resolved many times in the past to develop self-confidence. Unfortunately, though, you probably did not know where to begin. I am going to share with you secrets I have discovered that have helped me be more confident and successful.

In this article, you will find three easy-to-understand techniques that will help you develop the confidence to succeed when you are talking. These steps might seem strange to you at first, but give yourself a chance to succeed by fully engaging each technique. By the time you have implemented all three techniques, you will be well on your way to developing the confidence you need to succeed.

How To Be More Confident When Speaking:

Feel confident when you are talking

In this first technique, we will reprogram your mind so that you feel differently when you are talking in the future. This is surprisingly easy to do and will produce immediate results. After implementing this technique, you will find that you feel confident just thinking about when you are talking.

Just follow a few simple steps:

1. Think of a time when you felt very confident.

It could be a time when you were doing something that you are very good at, a time when things went particularly well for you, or perhaps a time when other people reacted to you in a way that made you feel confident. It does not matter what you were doing, where you were, or when this event happened. Just make sure you have a clear idea of a particular experience in which you felt confident.

2. Now close your eyes and visualize this confident experience as clearly as you can.

What does it look like in your mind? When you visualize this event, does the experience appear to be very close to you, or is it a small picture off in the distance? Is it in color, or is it in shades of gray? Are there sounds associated with the belief? Smells? Textures? Other feelings? Notice every detail. The purpose here is to find out where and how your mind stores the memory of this confident experience.

3. Now visualize yourself talking.

Take this image and make it look like your confident experience by moving it to the place where you saw your confident experience, making it the same size and color as your confident experience, and changing all of the associated, sounds, sights, and textures of the experience to appear like your confident experience. Visualize this “talking” experience as clearly as you can in this new way. The purpose here is to place your image of yourself talking in the same part of your mind where you keep the image of your confident experience.

4. Now stop visualizing.

Think about when you are talking. Do you feel differently about it than you did before this exercise? If you are like most people, you will find that you feel more confident now.

Better yet, next time you are talking you will naturally feel more confident because of this exercise.

Repeat this exercise regularly – preferably each night when you are falling asleep for the next couple of weeks – to keep a feeling of confidence when you are talking.

Feel confident on demand

There is another way to create a feeling of confidence when you are talking. Wouldn’t it be great if you could instantly make yourself feel confident whenever you needed to, regardless of where you were or what you were doing? You can.

In this technique, we will create an emergency button that you can push to create a feeling of confidence. Here are the steps:

1. Select a method of touching a part of your body discreetly.

For example, you could squeeze the knuckle of your left pinky finger, touch your index finger to your elbow, or touch a spot behind your ear. This touch should not have any meaning to you currently, because we are about to give it a new meaning. You will use this touch to trigger a feeling of confidence in the future.

2. Once again, visualize a time in your life when you felt confident

Iit can be the same experience you used in technique I above, or an entirely different experience. Immerse yourself in the memory. Watch it in your mind as if it were a movie, and pay attention to your feelings. Make the movie as large, bright, and engaging as possible. Repeat the process until you can really feel the sense of confidence that you felt during the experience. This time the purpose, is to really feel that feeling of confidence right now, as if you were reliving the confident experience you have selected.

3. During your visualization, when you are at the peak of that feeling of confidence, perform your trigger touch (from step 1 above).

This will associate your trigger with the feeling of confidence. This works because your mind creates connections between emotions and sensory inputs that coincide.

4. Repeat the first three steps above regularly until you develop a very strong connection between your trigger and the feeling of confidence.

The first time you use your trigger while feeling confident, you will create a weak connection between the trigger and the emotion of confidence. The second time, it will become a little stronger, the third time stronger still, and so forth. You want the connection to be very strong.

5. In the future, when you are talking, use this new trigger to create a feeling of confidence at will.

When you touch yourself in the way you have selected as a trigger, your mind will instantly leap to the associated feeling of confidence. This will give you an extra dose of confidence when you need it while you are talking.

Interestingly, your mind does not care about the direction of causation. Even though you created the confidence trigger by first creating an emotion of confidence and then using the trigger, your mind will allow the association to work in the other direction – use the trigger, and your mind will create the feeling of confidence. If there are other emotions (besides confidence) that would be helpful to you when talking, you can create separate triggers for those emotions, as well.

Build confidence by developing skills

This third technique aims to develop confidence in a more traditional way, by helping you to overcome the weaknesses that make you feel insecure when you are talking.

Start by making a list of skills that would make you feel more confident when talking. Rank them by importance, and identify the one that is most important to your confidence level. If you need help picking one, just fill in the missing word in the sentence: “I feel insecure when I am talking because I do not __________ well enough.”

Next, you are going to develop the missing skill. Make specific plans to practice this skill regularly. You might, for example, create a written practice schedule. Or you could schedule practice sessions in a planning program.

The key going forward will be to make your practice sessions as meaningful as possible. Effective practice has the following qualities:

a. The practice is designed to improve performance.

This means that you practice what you want to do. Make your practice sessions as similar as possible to the real experiences you will encounter when talking.

b. The practice needs to be easily repeatable.

Try to design a form of practice that does not require the involvement of others. Ideally, you want to be able to practice alone, at home, whenever you have free time. This will make it easier for you to practice often.

c. You need constant feedback on your practice sessions.

Develop your own scoring system to evaluate your practice performances, or get a friend to observe your practice sessions when possible. Keep records of your performance over time.

d. The practice needs to be demanding.

Find ways to make it harder and more challenging than your real life performance will be.

By following these steps you will build an important skill that will naturally help you feel more confident when you are talking. After you have mastered this skill, you might consider practicing another skill.

Conclusions

Each of these three techniques can be improved through use. As you make them a part of your life, you will find that it becomes easier and easier to be confident when you are talking.

The fact that you read this article is proof enough that you really want to feel more confident. You have already recognized the destructive influence of insecurity in your life. Now use these techniques to build real confidence, and start living the life you deserve.

I want to thank you for taking the time to read my article about how to be more confident when speaking. I sincerely hope its contents have been a good help to you.